Nowadays
The white crow, like the black rose, would have fared better in a cage. The last Dodo passed through the digestive tract of a Dutch sailor in the late 1600’s. The birds didn’t fear humans and couldn’t fly. The meat was closer to pork than chicken. So much of beauty resides in what is distant or extinct. The child grabs at a slant of light, dust-specks pirouetting. The man approaching fifty now yearns for the breasts he never caressed. When Mexican Marxists and Anarchists volunteered for the Sandinistas, they found themselves in a jungle. They ran out of provisions. But the region abounded in iguana. When you first chew iguana meat, it tastes of chicken, followed by rank seafood. De gustibus non. The married woman experiences, at last, strict pleasure during a tryst with a woman ten years her senior; her husband plans their anniversary, unawares. A century after the Church was established, the last naiad was found bathing in the Jordan River. Twelve hunters threw down their bows and arrows, exclaiming: Her beauty is perfect! The greater number of men insisted: Kill her!
© Anthony Seidman
Anthony Seidman‘s most recent publications are Cosmic Weather (Spuyten Duyvil, New York) and the chapbook The Defining Crisis of Your Lifetime is Utopia (Trainwreck Press, Canada). His poems, translations, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications like Bitter Oleander, Poetry International, LARB, World Literature Today, Ambit, and Conduit.
The Loch Raven Review 